商品簡介
"The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789" is the French Revolution's best known utterance. By 1789, to be sure, England looked proudly back to Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, and a bill of rights, and even the young American Declaration of Independence and the individual states' various declarations and bills of rights preceded the French Declaration. But the French deputies of the National Assembly tried hard, in the words of one of their number, not to receive lessons from others but rather "to give them" to the rest of the world, to proclaim not the rights of Frenchmen, but those "for all times and nations."
The chapters in this book treat mainly the origins of the Declaration in the political thought and practice of the preceding three centuries that Tocqueville designated the "Old Regime." David D. Bien shows that the Old Regime's society of privileged corporations dialectically prepared the terrain for the new society of individual rights while paradoxically bequeathing a legacy of social conflict about the nature of equality. Dale Van Kley explains why the kind of universal and timeless declaration the Assembly wanted to write was hardly thinkable until the events of the preceding three months had discredited France's competing versions of a "usable past" as either "despotic" or "aristocratic" or both.
Shanti M. Singham's chapter, on blacks, Jews, and women, points to the Declaration's largest single ambiguity involving the relation between natural rights and society: did the Declaration's natural rights cross these boundaries of race, gender, and religion or not? Keith Baker's blow-by-blow account of the Assembly's debates preceding its composition raises the question whether the Declaration was mainly concerned to limit an existing power or to institute a new one.
J. K. Wright finds the origins of the notions of sovereignty and the separation of powers in the distant sixteenth century. In his chapter, David A. Bell traces the safeguarding of the rights of the accused in legal practices and political trials from 1716 to 1789. Raymond Birn considers the natural rights to freedom of religious conscience and written expression by giving a detailed account of the origins of Articles 10 and 11 of the Declaration. In the final chapter, Thomas E. Kaiser shows how the monarchy increasingly turned to the "feudal" exploitation of the royal domain in order to cope with its ever more desperate fiscal situation, reversing its earlier sponsorship of anti-feudal juristic thought.
